CAELA FARREN

Do you expect breakthroughs in products and services? Do you encourage and reward innovation? Do you listen to customers?

Not all organizations are the same. Not all provide a powerful incubator for gaining mastery or developing management potential. When you become a manager and leader, you have a chance to create an organization with characteristics that assist in either attracting and retaining people who aspire to mastery or repelling those same people.

Six Vital Elements

Six things are vital to a progressive organization:

1. Sense of purpose. You want to be sure that your personal mission, values, and interests are closely aligned and attuned to those of the organization. If not, your talents will suffer, and you will feel your creative powers weaken. You want to either create or be part of a team totally dedicated to making a breakthrough, solving a problem, or creating something distinctive. Learning is tough enough, even in the presence of masterful mentors. A sense of common cause is what separates great organizations from the merely good ones. With nothing to energize or inspire them, people can become petty, self-serving, bored, lazy, and demoralized. Let your pride and passion be the arbitrator. Are you motivated by the purpose and mission of your organization?

2. Leaders from core professions. Belonging to an organization seen as the best by competitors, customers, and workers helps you develop depth and breadth in your profession. Be sure your leaders have more than 10 years of experience in their core professions. Find out if they are seen as industry leaders. Many companies are destroyed by executives with little or no familiarity with either their industry or core professions. Make sure your talent is essential to the success of the organization's mission. Surround yourself with people who are better than you are, who can give you feedback on your work.

3. Research and development culture. Effective leaders balance short-term achievement with long-term development. Yielding too easily to pressures to make fast profits can jeopardize the future. Leaders who seek to ensure long-term viability commit time, money, and resources to research and development.

Knowing the company's research plans helps you keep in touch with industry trends, new technologies, growth opportunities, and changes in competency and skill requirements.

4. An emphasis on encouraging learning. The hallmark of learning is not the number of courses taken or degrees achieved; learning shows up in results—bringing in clients from other cultures, seeing a way to use a technical process from another company, recognizing financial patterns that suggest the need for a new pricing or payment schedule. We each have our unique ways oflearning—alone, with others, through experimenting, reading, preparing papers for conferences, researching, tinkering, shadowing the best, scanning the Internet, and taking courses.

Organizations that foster learning reward breakthroughs in thinking, solving problems, creating new products, or expanding existing lines of service. They recognize and reward learning that serves the mission and strategy, and applaud the inventions of their experts. They expect people to keep learning and adding value.

5. Sharing wealth. Company success and profitability require long-term commitment from key employees. As a manager, you will want to build financial partnerships with them. But good salaries alone are no longer enough to retain their loyalty and emotional energy—they expect to share in the rewards generated from their expertise. This can mean childcare, flexible hours, pension and profit-sharing plans, memberships in associations, stock options, and royalties on products. Learn what motivates employees and share the benefits of increased productivity and financial success.

6.Entrepreneurial mindset. The best organizations concentrate on products and services that will be needed by many customers well into the future. They provide products or services that take care of basic human needs. They capture trends, predicting what will happen in housing, food, health care, leisure, financial security, and transportation. They work double time, handling current commitments while anticipating future needs.

New Roles

Tomorrow's managers will create new roles for their people: converters—converting today's technology to tomorrow's needs; scanners—finding new niches and customers; expediters—helping others to bypass red tape and regulations; browsers—looking at related industries, technologies, and professions for useful ideas; linkers—persuading individuals and related companies to join short-term partnerships; energy conservers—plugging drains in emotional, physical, or intellectual energy brought about by ineffective managers or poor work environments; talent scouts—looking for people with the potential to become masters.

Managers will become more dedicated to attracting and retaining experts and will become skilled in drafting contracts to achieve this. Managers will help protégées prepare for the future. Development discussions will focus on what contribution is needed to allow the organization and individual to grow. EE

Caela Farren is CEO of MasteryWorks. She is author of Who's Running Your Career? and Creating Stable Work in Unstable Times. 800-229-5712

Excellence in Action: Consider ways to infuse your organization with the six vital elements mentioned in this article.